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I know
that I may not be touching on anything novel here when I
say that horror comics aren't a dead art form, but you
have to appreciate that people keep saying it after the
horror comic was officially dead for a number of years.
For a long time I suffered through endlessly cheesy and
insipid "horror" themed comics from Marvel and DC both
of whom always possessed a respectable amount of
monsters and goblins, but no blood and zero realism
whatsoever. Even when they evoked the moods of EC
Comics, they chose to adamantly steer away from anything
grissly or disgusting, thus it was PG horror that felt
often like a dry hump for the respectable horror fan.
Their killers were more often vampires, robots, and
Frankenstein monsters, the only red we ever saw was on
our characters heads, and disembodied limbs were
confined to robots and aliens. That's not horror. That's
not even horrific. EC often had these exact elements,
but they had something of an imagination and a
foreboding dread that made them feel larger than fiction
and fantasy.
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Marvel and
DC attempting horror is clunky when you
compare them to the garish genius of EC just
understanding horror. They
understood the machinations, and devices,
and they didn't need to try too hard to
scare us. They also relied on the tropes of
horror that concerned karma and comeuppance
were more profound in their horror stories
than most other companies who were reliant
on a gimmicky title. While I did enjoy "Vampirella"
on occasion, the series was never quite the
inspiring love letter to storytelling I
hoped it would be, which is why I retreated
to EC Comics, when I could get them. Often
times I had to fish for them because in the
nineties when I was deeply rooted in to the
comic book bonanza of collecting, and
trading and looking for new issues of my
favorite heroes, the comics authority code
was often in rule, and this left no room for
edge or adult material. |
And the
internet was still so new and void of new content, so
that was off the table. Thankfully, as with all children
of that decade, I turned to older horror goons for my
supply of unadulterated carnage and gore. Imagine if you
will, a short five year old boy being introduced to
comics by his uncle who is shoving stacks of Captain
America, and Spider-Man into his lap and suddenly slips
in to the pile, a comic of a man holding an axe, and a
decapitated head of a woman. Now envision his gasp and
sheer astonishment as he flips through the pages and
feels a stir in his head. “What is this? My brain is
flush. Horror, awe, disgust, terror, realism, shocking
brutality, and my god, it's unlike anything I've ever
seen before in my life!” In a world where this five year
old is force fed Disney pablum with pat happy endings,
and talking animals, EC Comics was a shock to my system,
and I think I speak more for every horror comic geek out
there when I say that these comics did indeed steal our
innocence. And we liked it that way.
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what's missing in this new generation of
horror lovers. They're all so awfully
comfortable in the luxury and walls of their
internet domain that the art of exploration
has been completely pushed in to the
background. Having an older relative offer
up an old issue of their favorite comic is
much more interesting than simply keywording
EC Comics in to Google Images database and
finding small representations of the EC art
from some comic book collecting website.
There was a sense of finding treasure in a
time before the internet, there was
something magical about digging through old
stacks of comic books and dusty torn novels
with beautifully drawn covers that would
elicit gasps and awe from a young promising
horror buff. That age has gone the way of
the VHS, and bootleg, and the convention
tables. Now you can find it all at your
fingertip and there's really no sense of
adventure or journey. It's so easy and
quick, you can't savor it enough to realize
that you've reached a point in your life
where horror has completely an utterly
changed you for the better.
That's exactly
what happened to me. The minute something
new was put in to my hands I was changed. EC
Comics and Tales from the Crypt turned me in
to a horror buff wanting more and more and I
could never get enough. And everything that
I happened across was amazing and rewarding
because I had no computer or internet
access, so it was all a mini-quest to find
the best new movie to explore. There was no
Amazon.com to find customer reviews. No Ebay
to find an easy mint condition copy of a
rare comic from someone in Idaho. There was
no DVD burner or blank DVD's that allowed
you touch up and edit movies. |
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What
you found is what you got, and it was something you were
proud to own and something you were happy to keep as a
prized possession. And once it was gone, it was gone.
For a long time EC Comics, and many of its ilk were
utterly demonized thanks to that lovely man comic
aficionados know and speak ill of in the same vein as
Senator McCarthy: Dr. Frederic Wertham, a precursor of
the McCarthy era, who cashed in on the public hysteria
of the fifties and sixties where the American public
feared communists, bombs coming down on us, and the
threat of homosexuality! By god! Wait, am I still
talking about the 50’s or the new millennium? The only
dangers to the innocence was the imagination and
fantasies of a man who viewed superheroics as damaging
to the youth. Back then there was a source to
homosexuality and it had to be feared. And for a long
time I had to endure looking at the Comics Authority
Code for every single issue I put my hands on knowing
full well that they were doing the thinking for me, and
they were preventing me from killing and destroying our
society.
Of
course it never prevented me from stumbling on to issues
of Fangoria, and watching any splatter horror film I
wanted, because my parents subscribed to the idea that
teaching us the difference between what's reality and
what's fantasy was a good way to parent and not step
back and let some committee do it for them. So, what
sets us apart from those people fifty years ago who
bought into Wertham's hackery? Why are comics now much
more lenient than they were thirty years ago when
companies such as Marvel and DC had to conform to the
comic’s code where blood was not allowed to be red, and
given the absurd codename of "Plasma," and "Essence"? If
you ever pay attention to action series in the nineties,
the heroes never land punches, and they never say
murder. Though it’s an action of the censors, I like to
think the Comics code had a hand in that somewhat.
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Now with the
somewhat enlightenment of a new generation
the comics authority code is a thing of the
past and we're watching horror comics rise
from the shadows in droves and suffice it to
say it's fun to be a horror fan and a comic
book lover. We're given delightful fiction
like "Hack/Slash," and brilliant zombie
tales like "The Walking Dead," as well in a
sense of irony the superheroes from Marvel
and DC have been depicted as zombies and
vampires ripping the guts out of their
victims as a form of thumbing their boney
noses at the previous generation who were
convinced this form of fiction would
completely destroy the youth. And who can
forget works like "30 Days of Night," the
mini-series for icons like Jason, Freddy,
and Chucky, and of course Spawn, which made
waves in the nineties and somewhat saturated
itself in the late decade. I can't endorse
"The Walking Dead" enough. It's consistently
brilliant, and absolutely excellent.
Every generation
has to have a scapegoat, doesn't it? And
what with the rise of video games we're
right back where we started where most
people are convinced computer imagery
depicting acts of violence will corrupt the
impressionable youth, and never quite
pinning the blame on the parents who most
times should be more than aware of what
they're kids are up to. Now with the dead of
the comic book, and the rise of the
interactive video game and technology, comic
books are now given room to do more and
offer more variety for anyone in to the
horror genre. Zombies, aliens, serial
killers, slashers, witches, et al. all of
which have bred a new generation of comic
book lovers, and a new breed of horror
lovers, all of whom appreciate the art of
storytelling and are smart enough to realize
this doesn't corrupt you unless you allow it
to. |
Are we
more enlightened now than those puritanical times? Are
these companies more open to change and realism? Or is
the economy in such a downslide they're throwing all
their chips on the table and going for broke? I mean, we
still fear terrorism, we still frighten of bombs coming
from the skies to end us, and we still think
homosexuality is much scarier than poverty and war, but
why is today so different than yesterday? It if bleeds,
it leads, I guess is a phrase not just the media applies
to all of their content. Sex and violence sell in
America, we're fascinated by it. Some of us are even
obsessed with it. And we've come to a point in society
where gore is on top order, but sex be damned. With the
abolishment of the Comic's code, horror and its
inevitable turn of the tide in comics was bound to rise
once again.
I've
always considered the genre to be cyclical like
everything in life; it's a constantly transforming genre
that takes its time to boil. What may not be popular
today may be popular next month. And vice versa. And now
we're at a point where horror comics have gained a slow
resurgence packing a powerful punch with series that are
just utterly fantastic, perhaps thanks to our
willingness to be rid of old ideologies and breaking
down what we once considered taboos. This, of course,
ushered in a gradual resurgence of horror comics that
snuck up on us like grim death and initiated our
yearnings for the good old days of EC. While folks like
Wertham sought out to destroy the genre and all of the
content EC offered its audiences, its influence was
never quite lost on the generations and after a long
horrible stretch of absolute nothing in the nineties,
the new millennium has offered up a brand new
renaissance with folks like Robert Kirkman, Steve Niles
and Tim Seely, all of whom have fueled the invigoration
and allowed companies to revive EC Comics, celebrate its
anarchy, and give the youth a look at what was once
completely taboo and almost illegal. |
